126: 5 Steps to Help You Stand Up If Your Home Makes You Feel Like You Are Drowning!

When Your Home Makes You Feel Like You’re Drowning, It’s Time to Stand Up

You’ve probably seen those videos where someone’s panicking like they’re drowning, thrashing around, and someone off camera finally yells “stand up,” and it turns out they were in waist-deep water the whole time. Everyone laughs because all it took was standing up. I think about that a lot in relation to our homes.

Two sides of the same panic

Sometimes overwhelm in the home reflects something bigger, health, family, circumstances entirely outside your control. Your home becomes the one place you feel like you might have some control, which is exactly why you’ll sometimes see the opposite extreme too, obsessive, extreme organizing as someone’s way of gripping the one thing that feels controllable. Both are the same drowning feeling, just expressed in opposite directions. If you’re watching someone’s perfectly organized home on Instagram, pay attention to whether it looks like they’re actually living their life, or whether it looks like the organizing has quietly taken over instead.

Get help, even if it’s just perspective

If you’re in the version of overwhelm where you don’t even know where to begin, the first move is calling for help, a friend, a therapist, a professional organizer, anyone who can look at your situation from the outside and reflect back that it’s genuinely safe to stand up, that the water isn’t as deep as it feels from inside the panic. I recently spent three hours with a client with young babies who’d just moved into a new home, everything felt impossibly overwhelming, and by the end she was lighter, the house was lighter, and she knew she could keep going on her own. She’d stood up.

If you’re not ready to call someone yet, start here

Shut down the negative self-talk first, the “why can’t I ever get this right” spiral that only makes things worse. A blunt but effective reset: ask yourself honestly whether anyone would trade places with you right now. Someone sitting in a hospital with a sick child would trade their situation for your messy house in a heartbeat. That’s not meant to minimize your feelings, it’s meant to interrupt the pity spiral long enough to actually start moving.

Pick one room and follow these steps

First, take a photo, several angles. You’ll forget how bad it looked at the start, and without proof you’ll convince yourself nothing changed even after real progress. Second, grab anything easy and carry it all the way to its actual home, not just out of the room. If you find a mitten in the bathroom, walk it to the front hallway where it belongs, then come straight back. Dana K. White of A Slob Comes Clean has always taught this, carrying things all the way to their destination immediately, so that if you get pulled away mid-task, you haven’t just created a second mess somewhere else.

Third, tackle the knowns

In any space, some things clearly already have a home, everyday dishes go in a certain cabinet, silverware in a certain drawer, clothes in the dresser, towels used daily versus sheets used weekly. Handle those first. Clearing the obvious, easy-to-place items frees up the mental space to deal with what’s actually confusing.

Fourth, build a dam for the unknowns

This part sounds counterproductive coming from an organizer, but it works. Pick one out-of-the-way corner and declare it the holding spot for anything that requires a multi-step decision, anything too heavy or too complicated to solve right now. As you move through the room, when you hit something overwhelming, carry it straight to that corner instead of getting stuck deciding. Yes, it means postponing hard decisions. But decision-making is a muscle, and it loosens up with repetition. What felt impossible in the first five minutes might feel manageable ten minutes later, once you’ve built momentum.

Know when to stop

Decision-making fatigue is real. I rarely work with clients longer than three to four hours, because productivity clearly drops off after that. When you hit that wall, stop. Take a final photo and compare it to your starting picture, you will see a real difference, even with a pile still sitting in your dam corner. That pile isn’t failure, it’s simply what’s left for next time.

Give yourself grace, but not endless grace

It’s okay if this becomes a great three-day streak, or if it’s the only thing you manage to tackle for a week. Grace matters, but it has limits, once you notice you’ve slipped fully back into an unproductive pity party, that’s the moment to interrupt it again. And if you ever want backup, showing someone your before picture and saying “here’s where I need help” is a completely reasonable way to bring someone in partway through, not just at the very beginning.

Your practical, actionable step

Pick one overwhelming room today. Take a before photo, handle the easy items first, take care of the known-home items next, and designate one corner as your holding spot for anything too complicated to decide on right now. Work until you hit real decision fatigue, then take an after photo and notice what actually changed.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.